It's recently come to my attention that this month marks Sonic the Hedgehog's 30th anniversary. Really makes you feel old.
It's been a while since I covered Sonic, about two years at this point. The excellent Sonic Mania will go down in the annals of history as the inaugural winner of the "GOTBP Game of the Year" award. Who knows, maybe one day said award will actually mean something. Anyway, I do feel like sometimes I stray a little too far from my whole schtick of "playing forgotten games," especially when it comes to dealing with household names like Sonic. At the same time, it's also nice to revisit some more known commodities after coming across some of the junk that I get stuck playing. I toyed with the idea of doing a series retrospective or playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis, but then I remembered Sonic Spinball existed. Sure it's still Sonic, but its certainly not a mainline title in the series.
Sonic Spinball, released at the start of the holiday season in 1993, is exactly what it sounds like: a pinball game starring Sonic the Hedgehog...as the ball. I guess I get it, Sonic's spinning ability is one of his most well known moves, anyone that's played any of his games has seen it before. I guess arcades and pinball machines were still pretty popular at the time. But seriously? Pinball? Who's idea was that? Well, it sort of came about out of necessity. The folks at Sega realized that Sonic 3/Sonic and Knuckles wouldn't be ready in time for the '93 holiday season. They tapped their U.S. team to create a spinoff in time for the holidays, and after an incredibly fast two month development deadline, what we got was Sonic Spinball. That sounds like a recipe for complete disaster, any time a gamer hears "two month development cycle," they cringe.
But here's the thing: a fully staffed team of professionals working on a two month development cycle and a random indie developer doing it are two different animals entirely. I shudder to think of what conditions the dev team endured and the hours they worked during the creation of this game, but at the end of the day we are talking about a group at one of the top video game developers on the planet. Even though it was created on the tightest of deadlines, Sonic Spinball is a quality title. It's not the best game, but you can tell the people that made it knew how to make a video game and make it well.
As for the gameplay, it's a little bit more of a mixed bag. Controls are simple enough, A fires the left flipper, B the right and C both. As with any pinball table, you need to hit certain loops or targets to score points. Pinball is usually about scoring the most points, but that isn't the case here. Sonic Spinball's structure is more like a traditional video game, where you need to collect chaos emeralds to advance. Most of the triggers unlock new areas and lead to a boss fight at the end. There are only four levels, but they are all pretty big. The tables are well designed and very creative and each one consists of multiple parts. I do wish the game would tell you exactly what to aim for rather than give you vague hints, but I guess it would kill some of the challenge if it was just straight up "go here, hit that." A lot of the levels do include some brief platforming sections, though they are few and far between. You aren't going to be making any crazy jumps or anything like that, but there will be times where Sonic can land on platforms in the machine and when he does that, he leaves his ball form and stands up. This leads to some interesting dynamics and makes Spinball stand out from a run of the mill pinball game.
I did find the ball physics to be a little off, though you should take my opinion on this with a grain of salt. I am awful at pinball, both on actual machines and in video games. I can tell you that I never really could tell where exactly I wanted to send Sonic or how to actually get him there, but that might not be the game's fault. It was still frustrating though and I spent a lot of time taking shot after shot at hitting the same targets once I did know where I had to go. I will say that a lot of times, the wonky physics and hit detection actually worked in my favor. There were times I thought I was going down, and Sonic looked to be clipping through the flippers, only to have him launched back up to safety. It's technically a flaw, but one I'm not going to complain too much about. The biggest thing here though is that you do have some control of Sonic when he is in the air. Unlike most pinball games, you can actually make slight adjustments to your trajectory once the ball is launched. Sonic can be moved left and right or slowed down with the d-pad. This should bring an extra element to the game but honestly, I found it to be very inconsistent and I never truly could figure out how or why to best use this ability.
And that was a problem because this game was really hard. Again, I'm going to reiterate that I'm terrible at pinball, so that probably had a lot to do with it. But I don't think its the only problem. See, in a normal pinball game, you have three lives to get as many points as you can. You lose a ball when it falls down past the flippers and when this happens three times, the game is over. You can lose all of your momentum in one fell swoop, which comes with the territory. Sonic Spinball follows that same structure, you have three lives to complete all the tables, lose them all and its game over. But here's the problem: a video game is structured different from a pinball table. Remember, its not just about points, you have to complete various objectives to complete each level, which can take 10, 15 or even 20 minutes. If you lose a life, you go back to the beginning of the level. Which means you have to complete all the objectives again. There are no checkpoints, it doesn't matter if you die on the boss or die at the beginning, you go back. And remember, you can die at a moments notice. That makes the game incredibly frustrating and its probably the biggest problem with the game. It's definitely what prevented me from enjoying it to the fullest.
However, I did find the game fair. As frustrating as it was to lose all your progress in a flash, it never felt like I died for a stupid reason. It always felt like I was losing because I'm bad at the game, not because of some cheap bs. Honestly, that might have been a deal breaker, I'm not sure I would have been able to spend as much time as I did with the game otherwise. It really is impressive how technically sound Spinball is considering its truncated development cycle. It's clear a lot of thought went into the design of the tables and they really do feel like actual pinball machines. It's not the idea I would have come up with, but hey, I guess it worked.
Sonic Spinball is another one of those games where you can see exactly why it fell by the wayside. Sure, it's Sonic, but it's certainly not the Sonic game most Genesis owners would have asked for in 1993. It received middling reviews back in the day, so people weren't exactly falling all over themselves to pick it up, especially knowing Sonic 3 was on the horizon. I'm not going to call Spinball a cash grab, that kind of implies that it's of poor quality. Sega may have been in "get literally anything on the shelf for the holidays" mode, but at least the product they cranked out was quality and, dare I say, a little bit innovative. That's Sega for you, innovating without even trying. Sonic Spinball isn't worth actively seeking out, but its worth another look if you come across it in the wild or you're an avid fan of the blue blur.
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